After a lot of listening and editing, the basic structure of our 11th album is getting together slowly but surely. After the turbulence of the last year, none of us has known what to expect when going into the studio.

We have used the drums Jörg recorded alone at Soundtrack studio about a year ago. There was about 70 gigabytes of drums, so that took a while to listen to. And bit of tough decisions, and editing, cutting and pasting. New lyrics and vocal melodies have been written, and also some new songs.
Says Timo Tolkki: "I recorded all my rhythm guitars during one evening. God, my fingers still hurt!! There is a construction project going on under my studio. They are building a parking hall and are exploding huge bombs twice a day. Also there is lots of drilling. I am sure that this is the first time in the history of metal that an album has been recorded under circumstances like these."
It has indeed been very hard to record vocals and acoustic instruments. But we are finally getting there, slowly but surely. It's flowing and the feeling is really good. The vocals will for sure be finished before Timo Kotipelto's solo tour embarks. Then of course, the mixing... the mixing... the mixing. Stratovarius has never made a compromise when it comes to the sound and this time with TT in his own studio.. my God, anything under two months of mixing and we'll be lucky. Anyway we would like to thank you, the fans, for your patience and hope that you enjoy this progress report and some new pictures.

The cluster we are on at Dreamhost has lately had a few issues
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As of Fri Mar 9 05:00:01 2012 GMT, server was up 172 days, 18:56. Load average last minute was 1.42, last five minutes 2.05, last fifteen minutes 2.22.
Load averages over 20 will make everything here very sluggish.